Regenerative cells are useful for various therapeutic applications, such as tissue engineering, and regenerative medicine. For example, regenerative medicine aims to regenerate damaged tissue by stimulating the damaged organ or tissue, by healing them and producing regenerative cells. The regenerative cells improve the condition of a diseased state. For example, it is used to regenerate heart muscles to replace damaged heart tissue after heart attack. A tissue comprising regenerative cells can be cultured in the laboratory, and used to facilitate organ or tissue transplantation into a patient as per the patient's need.
Adipose tissue is recognized as an accessible and reliable source for isolation of the regenerative cells. A population of adipose derived regenerative cells comprises several cell types, such as adult stem cells, pre-adipocyte, fibroblast, endothelial progenitor cells, vascular endothelial cells, and vascular smooth muscle cells among others. Various methods have been explored to extract regenerative cells from the waste product after cosmetic surgery, such as abdominoplasty or liposuction procedures. The adipose tissue is digested using lytic enzymes to release heterogenous population of regenerative cells, which contribute to wound repair through a variety of mechanisms by promoting blood vessel growth and blocking apoptosis. Adipose derived regenerative cells can differentiate into several tissue types, such as bone, cartilage, fat, skeletal muscle, smooth muscle and cardiac muscle.
Although various methods and systems for isolating adipose derived regenerative cells are known in the art, the isolation of cells with high quality, and in sufficient quantity for use in the therapeutic application, are unmet needs. Moreover, current methods for isolating adipose derived regenerative cells require different steps including digestion of adipose tissue, various filtration steps, and centrifugation processes, which make the methods more time consuming, expensive, elaborate, and complicated. The current systems, for isolating adipose derived regenerative cells, are more complex because they require several compartments, separate machinery or parts for various functions such as mixing, separation, or centrifugation.
A significant simplification in the design of a system is needed which does not require, for example, propellers, fans, paddles, and a centrifuge or vortex for fluid agitation. Each of these components complicates the difficulties associated with maintaining a sterile system and increases costs, device size, and risk of equipment malfunction.